74 Time December 21/December 28, 2020
2020 Guardians of the Year
this autumn. “This second wave is even more diffi-
cult than the first,” she says. “There is much more ex-
haustion.” Still, she says, she has no regrets. “When
I wake up and open my eyes, I know I have a role.”
Archana Ghugare faces not just fatigue but also
economic hardship as a result of her commitment to
battling the virus. A 41-year-old community health
worker in India’s western state of Maharashtra, she
is part of a 1 million-strong all-female force known
as Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs)—
workers serving as a conduit between rural com-
munities and the broader public-health system. She
worked five to six hours a day as an ASHA before the
pandemic. When the disease first hit, that stretched
to 12 hours—and required that she sacrifice more
than time. The government paid a monthly COVID-
19 bonus of just 1,000 rupees, or about $13.50—
enough for two weeks of groceries for Ghugare’s fam-
ily of four—which did not make up for what she had
been earning from other part-time jobs, or her hus-
band’s income when he lost his job as well.
“It feels like there is a sword over our heads,”
Ghugare says. Things improved in October when the
COVID-19 caseload began to fall and she could return
to her part-time work. But with the recent Novem-
ber spike in infections, the government has asked
the ASHAs to be on standby, likely putting Ghugare
back in the fight. “We are told we have the respect of
millions around the country for the work we do,” she
says. “But respect won’t fill our stomachs.”
If the pandemIc has spared no part of the world
and no portion of the population, it has nonetheless
exhibited a special animus for the elderly and the
housebound. That has pressed a whole population of
workers into emergency service. Tanya Lynne Rob-
inson, 56, is a home health aide in Cleveland, caring
for people too old or sickly to venture outside—and
thus performing her service in near invisibility.
“We do our job every day without people saying
thank you,” she says. “We’re the forgotten heroes, the
underpaid heroes.” Early in the pandemic they were
also the underprotected heroes. The agency that em-
ploys Robinson had only limited PPE for its workers,
and in her case that was especially dangerous. Suffer-
ing from asthma and multiple sclerosis, she is at risk
of contracting a severe case of COVID-19.
All the same, even before the third wave of the
pandemic hit, she redoubled her commitment to bat-
tling it. In September, she became a certified nurse’s
aide and is planning to take online courses to become
a licensed practical nurse as well. “I’m prepared to
do whatever I need to do,” she says.
Home health aides like Robinson have not been
alone in receiving too little recognition. Take Sabrina
Hopps, 47, a housekeeping supervisor who works
10½ hours a day in a Washington, D.C., intensive-
care unit, sanitizing patients’ rooms. It is Hopps
and workers like her who disinfect light switches,
bed rails, call buttons, side tables and ventilator ma-
chines. It is Hopps and others like her who, because
of U.S. health- insurance privacy requirements, may
not even know if a patient whose room they are clean-
ing has COVID-19. And it is Hopps and those like her
who have become among the patients’ few human
contacts. “Just having a conversation with a patient,
that will make their day better, on top of yours,” she
says. And as for those patients on ventilators who
can’t talk at all? “I have learned to read lips,” she says.
Then too there is the staff of the SharonBrooke
assisted- living facility in Licking County, Ohio, who
not only tend to their elderly patients but also moved
in with them for 65 days early in the pandemic and 30
more later in the summer. The reason: if they all quar-
antined together, they could minimize the chance a
staffer could contract the virus on the outside and
transmit it to the vulnerable population within.
It wasn’t easy. The staff showered in shifts, did
their laundry only on assigned days, and gave up
the simple privilege of sleeping in their own beds
and seeing their families. “It was kind of like we